Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the new OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
DW
An EU official has said that the bloc needs to drastically increase the resources it is putting into the battle against the Ebola outbreak. Meanwhile, the UN has warned against quarantining people for no good reason.
Christos Stylianides, who was appointed by the European Union last week to lead the fight against Ebola in West Africa, said in Brussels on Monday that the 28-member bloc needed to increase the number of hospital beds dedicated to fighting the outbreak to 5,000 from the current 1,000. This, he said, would require tens of thousands of more health workers.
"Every bed requires eight health and support staff. This means we need to mobilize immediately at least 40,000 staff," he said.
In a speech to the Emergency Response Coordination Center in Brussels, Stylianedes said he intended to travel to West Africa shortly after he takes up his post as European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management at the start of next month.
Reuters
The U.S. military was isolating personnel returning from their mission to help West African countries curb Ebola even though they showed no sign of infection and a nurse who treated patients in Sierra Leone was released on Monday to go to her home state after New Jersey forced her into quarantine.
The decision by the Pentagon goes well beyond previously established military protocols and came just as the White House pushed to roll back steps by U.S. states to quarantine healthcare workers returning from the three countries at the center of the Ebola epidemic even if they were asymptomatic.
The U.S. Army has already isolated about a dozen soldiers at part of a U.S. base in Vicenza, Italy, including Major General Darryl Williams, who oversaw the initial response to the Ebola outbreak, the worst on record with nearly 5,000 dead.
NPR
Kaci Hickox, the nurse who spent the weekend in mandatory quarantine after arriving in New Jersey from West Africa, will be discharged from the hospital and allowed to leave the state, officials said today, citing tests that have shown she's been free of any Ebola symptoms for the past 24 hours.
The move could allow Hickox, a Texas native, to travel to Maine, where she currently lives.
A Doctors Without Borders worker who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, Hickox has been under close monitoring in an isolation tent since Friday, when officials found she had a fever. After a preliminary blood test found she didn't have Ebola early Saturday, Hickox hired a civil rights lawyer to work for her release.
New Jersey's health department issued a statement this morning, reading in part:
"After consulting with her, she has requested transport to Maine, and that transport will be arranged via a private carrier not via mass transit or commercial aircraft. She will remain subject to New Jersey's mandatory quarantine order while in New Jersey. Health officials in Maine have been notified of her arrangements and will make a determination under their own laws on her treatment when she arrives."
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Charlotte, N.C., merchant Tonieh Ross says her heart cries for the orphaned children back home in Liberia who aren’t getting the hugs they so need, for fear of the deadly Ebola virus.
Ross, the owner of the Virtuous D Boutique, also frets about her younger sister in Monrovia, Eugenia, whose paycheck disappeared when her employer shuttered his business and left the disease-ravaged country. Now Eugenia is among some 20 desperate Liberians, mostly children, phoning Ross “over and over and over until something happens” – that is, until she or her friends send money or food, she said.
Reuters
Federal health officials on Monday called for voluntary home quarantine for people at the highest risk for Ebola infection but said most medical workers returning from West Africa would require daily monitoring without isolation.
The announcement by Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ran counter to the mandatory quarantines being imposed on returning doctors and nurses by a handful of states including New York and New Jersey.
In addition, the U.S. military said it was isolating troops returning from their mission to help West African countries curb Ebola even though they showed no sign of infection, while a nurse who treated patients in Sierra Leone was released to go to her home state after New Jersey had forced her into quarantine.
Frieden said high-risk people include healthcare workers who suffer a needle stick while caring for an Ebola patient or who tend to a patient without protective gear.
NY Times
Even as New Jersey officials on Monday released a nurse they had kept quarantined in a tent since her return from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, an unapologetic Gov. Chris Christie dismissed those who questioned his handling of the case and denied that he had reversed himself.
The nurse, Kaci Hickox, 33, who had previously been working with Doctors Without Borders, became the first public test case for a mandatory quarantine that both Mr. Christie and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Friday.
One of Ms. Hickox’s lawyers, Steven Hyman, said she had been released midday from University Hospital in Newark. A hospital spokeswoman said that two black S.U.V.s with tinted windows were headed to Maine, with the patient as a passenger in one. The spokeswoman, Stacie Newton, declined to say where in Maine the convoy was going, or whose vehicles they were.
The Guardian
Eric Kennie is a Texan. He is as Texan as the yucca plants growing outside his house. So Texan that he has never, in his 45 years, travelled outside the state. In fact, he has never even left his native city of Austin. “No sir, not one day. I was born and raised here, only place I know is Austin.”
You might think that more than qualifies Kennie as a citizen of the Lone Star state, entitling him to its most basic rights such as the ability to vote. Not so, according to the state of Texas and its Republican political leadership. On 4 November, when America goes to the polls in the midterm elections, for the first time in his adult life Eric Kennie will not be allowed to participate.
Ever since he turned 18 he has made a point of voting in general elections, having been brought up by his African American parents to think that it is important, part of what he calls “doing the right thing”. He remembers the excitement of voting for Barack Obama in 2008 to help elect the country’s first black president, his grandmother crying tears of joy on election night. “My grandfather and uncle, they used to tell me all the time there will be a black president. I never believed it, never in a million years.”
The Guardian
Juana Villegas was heading home from a doctors appointment in July 2008 when police in Nashville, Tennessee, pulled her over. Her three children sat in the car as officers asked Villegas for her driver’s license. Her fourth child would be born three days later, after his mother had shackled to a hospital bed during labor.
Because of a now-defunct immigration policy, the officers were able to act as de facto immigration agents and arrest Villegas for her lack of identification.
“Give your baby a kiss, kiss your baby,” an officer says in the video of her arrest. “You are going with me to jail, carcel, you don’t have a driver’s license.”
Last week, six years of protracted legal battles produced an important milestone as Villegas became the proud owner of a visa that puts her on track for permanent residency in the US, where she has lived since the mid-1990s.
The Guardian
A 14-year-old girl who was wounded when a student opened fire inside a Washington state high school has died, raising the death toll in the shooting to three.
Gia Soriano died on Sunday night, more than two days after she was shot, officials at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett said.
“We are devastated by this senseless tragedy,” her family said in a statement, read at a news conference by Dr Joanne Roberts. “Gia is our beautiful daughter, and words cannot express how much we will miss her.”
Roberts said Gia’s family was donating her organs for transplant.
Another girl was killed on Friday when a popular freshman at Marysville-Pilchuck high school north of Seattle opened fire.
The Guardian
There was a flood of polling data released over the weekend in the US midterm elections. All the key Senate races were polled, gubernatorial races were polled, generic ballots were polled, voter expectations were polled and, basically, if they didn’t call you personally, you should feel left out.
The quick gist: while some races remain on a knife edge, the perceived Republican advantage in the battle for the Senate is holding. The details are at YouGov and Marist and Annenberg. Or you can just skim the headlines:
Republicans have expanded their advantage in the final days of the midterm campaign – Wall Street Journal
“... our Senate forecast has said pretty much the same thing every day… this degree of stability is unusual.” – FiveThirtyEight
The Republicans still hold an edge in what has become a very stable fight for the Senate – New York Times
Reuters
Lava flow from the Kilauea volcano that has been creeping toward inhabited areas of Hawaii's Big Island for months is now just 100 yards (meters) from the nearest residential property, authorities said on Monday.
Residents in the path of the lava have been placed on alert for possible evacuation, the County of Hawaii said in a civil defense alert.
The lava flow, which first bubbled out of the continuously erupting volcano on June 27, had come to a standstill in late September, but resumed its slow crawl forward several weeks ago.
The leading edge of the flow is now heading toward Pahoa village, a historic former sugar plantation consisting of small shops and homes with a population of about 800 people.
Reuters
A Washington state high school where a student fatally shot two 14-year-old girls and wounded three more classmates before taking his own life canceled classes Monday as the tight-knit community mourned the dead, local officials said.
Freshman Jaylen Fryberg walked with a handgun into the cafeteria at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, north of Seattle, on Friday and took aim at a table where two cousins and three close friends were gathered, police and family members said.
A first-year teacher tried to intervene in the attack, the latest in a string of such incidents at U.S. schools that have renewed a national debate about student safety and gun control.
LA Times
American Airlines canceled a London-bound flight out of Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday after a passenger's phone picked up a WiFi network named "Al-Quida Free Terror."
LAX police officers boarded the plane about 10 p.m. and investigated the incident. A photograph posted online of one passenger's phone shows it connected with the full-strength WiFi hotspot.
Officials, though, determined no crime had been committed, police Sgt. Karla Ortiz said.
"Passengers were interviewed and cleared to continue with their travel plans," she said in a statement.
Nevertheless, the incident prompted the airline to cancel the scheduled flight, stranding many passengers in Los Angeles for a day.
Passenger Anthony Simon, who appears to work in digital communications, wasn't pleased and took to Twitter to express his frustration.
The Guardian
Fifteen former federal and state judges have called for a stay of execution for Mark Christeson, a Missouri death row inmate who is set to be executed on Wednesday, arguing that the prisoner has in effect been abandoned by his own court-appointed lawyers.
Christeson, 35, will be judicially killed by lethal injection at 12.01am on Wednesday, barring a last-minute stay of execution. He is the only death row inmate in Missouri to have been denied a habeas review of his case – a crucial stage in the legal process that allows a prisoner to challenge his death sentence in the federal courts.
The legal record shows that the two public defense lawyers who have represented Christeson at the federal review stage missed a key deadline to file his petition. As a result, the prisoner was told he was not entitled to have his case looked at again because his request had been made in an “untimely” manner – thus destroying his last major hope of having his sentence overturned before execution.
The spotlight is now falling on his two Missouri-based lawyers, Eric Butts from St Louis and Philip Horwitz from Chesterfield. Not only did they file the petition 117 days late, they only met the prisoner for the first time more than a month after the April 2005 deadline had passed.
DW
Ukraine's pro-Western parties have begun coalition talks after securing the most votes in Sunday's parliamentary elections. The new government is tasked with quelling a pro-Russian insurgency in the country's east.
Exit polls indicate that the parties in Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's bloc won around 21 percent of the votes in Sunday's elections. The People's Front group of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was second, with a slight advantage, just above 21 percent.
"Talks have already begun," said Yuriy Lutsenko of Poroshenko's party on Monday.
The pro-European Samopomich (Self-Help) party came third with 11 percent. The Opposition bloc, a pro-Kremlin organization, took fourth with just under 10 percent, followed by the populist Radical Party at just over seven percent, and the Fatherland party of former premier Yulia Tymoshenko between five and six percent. The nationalist Svoboda party, with between and four and five percent, failed to clear the five percent hurdle required for a place in the country's parliament.
Al Jazeera
A group of Taliban fighters have attacked a court in the northern city of Kunduz in Afghanistan, killing at least seven people including prosecutors.
The prosecutors were shot in their offices at close range, officials said on Monday.
Four attackers wearing army uniforms attacked the provincial appeals court, setting off a four-hour gun battle with Afghan security forces, Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, provincial police spokesman, told AFP news agency.
"They first blew up an explosives-laden car at the gate of the court and then entered the building."
The attackers "killed six court officials and one police. Eight people were wounded", Hussaini said, adding that the fighters were also killed.
Al Jazeera
Police in Spain have arrested over 50 people across the country, including senior members of the ruling party, in the biggest anti-corruption sweep in the country's history.
Monday's mass raids targeted 51 senior politicians alleged to be part of a huge corruption network, those arrested will face charges of money laundering, embezzlement and influence peddling.
The probe was centred mainly in town halls and regional governments in Madrid and Leon in the centre of the country and Murcia and Valencia in the east.
Francisco Granados, a former secretary-general of the governing Popular Party, was the most prominent figure to be detained.
Granados resigned in February after daily newspaper El Mundo reported that he has almost two million dollars in a Swiss bank account.
Miguel-Anxo Murado, a Spanish journalist, told Al Jazeera from Madrid that members of both the People's Party and the opposition Socialists were among those detained, besides two Madrid mayors.
Al Jazeera
The Israeli government has said that it is advancing construction plans to build about 1,000 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem that Palestinians want to be part of their future state.
A government official said on Monday that plans include building infrastructure in the occupied West Bank that will be used by Palestinians as well as Israelis. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.
Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from West Jerusalem, said that about 600 additional houses will be built in Ramat Shlomo and 400 in Har Homa districts of East Jerusalem.
The Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, home to the city's most sensitive holy sites for Jews, Muslims and Christians, as their future capital and oppose any Israeli construction there.
Israel has said all of Jerusalem will forever be its capital, citing historical, religious and security reasons. But the international community, including the US, does not recognise Israel's annexation of the eastern sector of the contested city.
The housing announcement could greatly escalate tensions in East Jerusalem, which has been the scene of violent unrest for months.
Spiegel Online
Last year, Michelle Bachelet, 63, was elected to be president of Chile for the second time. When the Socialist politician became the country's first female president eight years ago, she symbolized the country's transformation after the end of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1990.
When she left office in 2010, she still had a popularity rating of over 80 percent. But she couldn't stand for re-elected because Chilean election law prohibits a president from serving two consecutive terms. A pediatrician by vocation, Bachelet is a single mother and is the daughter of Alberto Bachelet Martínez. Her father remained loyal to Salvador Allende, the Socialist president murdered after the 1972 military putsch. Bachelet would himself later die in prison following repeated torture.
The Guardian
Toronto voters were heading to the polls on Monday to replace Mayor Rob Ford, the bombastic figure who rose to international fame after revelations surfaced about his use of crack cocaine, and who dropped out of the race in September after announcing that he had a rare form of cancer.
At the end of a long and often bitter campaign, the race has coalesced around three candidates: former Progressive Conservative party leader John Tory, former New Democratic Party MP Olivia Chow, and Doug Ford, Rob’s brother and erstwhile campaign manager, who announced his intention to run when the mayor was diagnosed with malignant pleomorphic liposarcoma.
Despite his late entry, Doug Ford is polling in second place with 32% of the vote, according to a Mainstreet technologies poll on 24 October, which put him just six points behind frontrunner John Tory. Chow trailed in third place at 20%. A City News / Forum Research poll on Sunday put the gap slightly wider, with Ford 12 points behind Tory, who led with 44%.
NPR
Morning Edition host David Greene and producer Lauren Migaki traveled to Crimea to see what's changed since Russia sent troops in this spring and shortly afterward annexed the territory despite widespread international criticism. Their stories will be on air and online this week.
We're traveling through flat farmland on a two-lane road in the far north of Crimea, when suddenly it's interrupted by a checkpoint. Actually, Russia now considers it the border, a physical reminder of the new divide between Russia and Ukraine — and the West.
A guy in military camouflage, with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder, sees NPR producer Lauren Migaki with her tape recorder going, and he makes it clear he wants it off.
She turns off the recorder. But that's not enough. Another guy in military fatigues comes over and says we broke the law as foreigners by being so close to a Russian border. He takes our passports and asks our interpreter to come with him, leaving us to wait.
This little episode is a personal reminder that Russia is now in control. All across Crimea, the signs of Russian power and influence have arrived.
Reuters
Spain's central government took the first step on Monday towards blocking a "consultation of citizens" that the Catalonia region intends to hold next month in the place of a full referendum on independence from Spain that was barred by a court.
The wealthy, northeastern region earlier this month dropped plans to hold the referendum planned for Nov. 9, but said it would still stage a non-binding vote that would be open to anyone who wanted to cast their ballot.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has vowed to block the initiative if it were found to be illegal and on Monday asked the Council of State for its opinion on this new consultation -- the first legal step towards preventing the vote.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
US drugstore chain Rite Aid Corp will ban Apple Inc’s new electronic payments service in its 4,572 stores as it commits to joining a consortium of other large retailers developing a rival payments system.
Retailers including Walmart Stores Inc, Target Corp , Kohl’s Corp have all refused to accept Apple Pay at their stores.
Apple Pay, which was unveiled in September, is a mobile payment app that allows consumers to buy things by simply holding their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices up to readers installed by store merchants.
The rival system, called Current C, is being developed by Merchants Customer Exchange (MCX), a consortium of merchants that includes Rite Aid and CVS.
Rite Aid stopped accepting Apple Pay last week. Spokeswoman Ashley Flower said the company is continually evaluating various forms of mobile payment technologies.
ScienceBlog
The first images of a nova during its early fireball stage–when it ejects material, and gases expand and cool–show that this activity is more complicated than predicted.
That is the conclusion, published in the current issue of Nature, from a research collaboration led by Georgia State University Astronomer Gail Schaefer that includes 37 researchers (many who are National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded) from 17 institutions. The researchers observed the expanding thermonuclear fireball from a nova that erupted last year in the constellation Delphinus.
ScienceBlog
Proof-of-concept study highlights new therapeutic use of engineered human stem cells
Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have devised a new way to use stem cells in the fight against brain cancer. A team led by neuroscientist Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, who recently demonstrated the value of stem cells loaded with cancer-killing herpes viruses, now has a way to genetically engineer stem cells so that they can produce and secrete tumor-killing toxins.
In the AlphaMed Press journal STEM CELLS, Shah’s team shows how the toxin-secreting stem cells can be used to eradicate cancer cells remaining in mouse brains after their main tumor has been removed....
NPR
So it's A.D. 150, and you've just had a long day at the gym (or ludus), thrusting and parrying with your fellow Roman gladiators. What do you reach for to replenish your sapped strength? A post-workout recovery drink, of course.
Modern-day athletes often nurse their muscles with supplement shakes or chocolate milk after a workout. Similarly, gladiators, the sports stars of the Roman Empire, may have guzzled a drink made from the ashes of charred plants — a rich source of calcium, which is essential for building bones, researchers report this month in the journal PLOS One.
"Plant ashes were evidently consumed to fortify the body after physical exertion, and to promote better bone healing," Fabian Kanz, a forensic anthropologist at the Medical University of Vienna who led the research, said in a statement. "Things were similar then to what we do today."
NPR
How does a sunset work? We love to look at them, but Jolanda Blackwell wanted her 8th graders to really think about them, to wonder and question.
So Blackwell, who teaches science at Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior High in Davis, Calif., had her students watch a video of a sunset on YouTube as part of a physics lesson on motion.
"I asked them: 'So what's moving? And why?'" Blackwell says. The students had a lot of ideas. Some thought the sun was moving, others, of course, knew that a sunset is the result of the earth spinning around on its axis.
Once she got the discussion going, the questions came rapid-fire. "My biggest challenge usually is trying to keep them patient," she says. "They just have so many burning questions."
Students asking questions and then exploring the answers. That's something any good teacher lives for. And at the heart of it all is curiosity.
NPR
Translating from one language to another is a tricky business, and when it comes to interpreting between a doctor and patient, the stakes are even higher.
Consider the story of 18-year-old baseball player Willie Ramirez.
In 1980, Ramirez was taken to a South Florida hospital in a coma, says Helen Eby, a certified medical interpreter in Oregon. "His family apparently used the word 'intoxicado' to talk about this person," she says. "Well, 'intoxicado' in Spanish just means that you ingested something. It could be food; it could be a drug; it could be anything that has made you sick."
The family thought something Ramirez had eaten might have caused his symptoms. But the interpreter translated their Spanish as "intoxicated."
The Guardian
Twitter’s share price dropped 10% in after-hours trading on Monday amid continuing signs of slowing growth at the social media company.
Results released on Monday for the third quarter of the year show Twitter’s revenues soared to $361m, up 114% from the same period last year, beating expectations. But the number of monthly active users of the service grew just 13 million to 284 million from the previous quarter. Analysts had predicted growth would between 14 million and 17 million.
The number of monthly active users represents a 23% increase year on year but was up just 4.8% from the last set of results and below the 6.3% quarter-on-quarter growth it reported in the second quarter.
The company has shaken up management and begun changing its platform in order to make it more accessible to new users. During the quarter it updated its service on Apple’s iPhone, introduced a new options for its Vine video service and launched a new service tailored to NFL fans. Last week it held its first developers conference in four years, a move to embed its real-time technology in a new generation of apps and services.